An Introduction To Chromatic Aberration In Refractors

The popularity of high-quality refractors draws attention to color
correction in such instruments. There are several point of confusion
and misconceptions. I am not an optical designer - just a used
physicist who occasionally masquerades as an amateur telescope maker or
amateur astronomer - but perhaps I can clear things up a bit.

LONGITUDINAL CHROMATIC ABERRATION:

Nobody makes refractors with single-lens objectives because of
longitudinal chromatic aberration, briefly called "longitudinal color".
A simple lens has different focal lengths at different wavelengths. A
well made lens will give a sharp image in any color you like, but that
image will be blurred by the out-of-focus images of all other colors,
combined. If you plot the focal length of a simple lens as a function
of wavelength, across the visible spectrum, you will find that the
difference between the minimum focal length (for blue) and the maximum
(red) is about one and a half percent of the average focal length.
Thus, a simple lens of nominal focal length 1000 mm might have a focal
length in the red of 1007.5 mm and in the blue of 992.5 mm. Such a lens
is said to have longitudinal chromatic aberration, across the visual, of
one and a half percent, or 15 mm for a 1000 mm focal length.

Suppose you make such a lens, that is 100 mm diameter, and use it as
an f/10 objective in a telescope. If you adjust an eyepiece to be in
focus half way between red and blue, at the 1000 mm position, images of
bright stars will be surrounded by an overlapping violet glow - the
out-of-focus red and blue images mixed - that is 7.5 mm divided by 10,
or 750 microns in diameter. The diameter of the Airy disc of a
diffraction-limited f/10 objective is only about 13 microns, over 50
times smaller, so our simple-lens refractor won't work very well.

ACHROMATS:

Using two kinds of glass helps a lot, if the glass types are well
chosen. With a positive lens of crown glass, and a negative one less
strong, of flint glass, one can design a lens with longitudinal color
reduced to about 0.05 percent of focal length. A lens that is a
combination of two simple lenses is called a doublet. Such lenses are
usually designed to focus blue and red light to the same position, with
all other colors focusing at either slightly longer or slightly shorter
focal lengths. A lens that brings two colors to a single focal point is
called an achromat. That 0.05 percent is the longitudinal distance
between where red and blue focus, and where green focuses.

For such an achromat, the longitudinal chromatic aberration on our
100 mm f/10 objective is only 500 microns. If we focus for best
sharpness in the green, star images will be surrounded by a purple haze
that is only 50 microns in diameter - four times the diameter of the
Airy disc. The eye is most sensitive to green light, and some common
glass combinations do better than I have described, hence a modern
four-inch f/10 achromat made from conventional glasses is pretty good
with respect to chromatic aberration. I have one - a Vixen - and
though it does show a tad of purple haze, it is a fine instrument.

Whizzier optical materials make whizzier achromats. Use of
first-generation "ED" glasses can reduce the longitudinal color by a
factor of four, to 0.0125 percent of the focal length, and later ED
glasses or fluorite can get another factor of two. A well-made
four-inch f/10 doublet achromat using ED glass can have the purple blur
the same size as the Airy disc, and a fluorite doublet of the same size
can have the blur smaller than the Airy disc. That's why people like ED
and fluorite doublets.

APOCHROMATS:

Still more pieces of glass can help more. A triplet objective -
using three pieces of glass - can be designed to bring three colors of
light to the same focal point: Remember that a garden variety achromatic
doublet does so for just two. A lens system which brings three colors
to the same focal point is called an apochromat. Three instead of two
is not necessarily better, however - it is a win only if the total
length of the longitudinal blur, where all the other colors come to
focus, is reduced.

There are even some wild glass types, with odd optical properties,
whose use permits the design of a two-lens apochromat - just two pieces
of glass can bring three colors to the same focal point. Last I heard,
however, these glasses were expensive, difficult to work, and not very
durable. But perhaps we will see more of them in the future.

APOCHROMATS AND ACHROMATS COMPARED:

Some early triplet apochromats had as much longitudinal color as
achromats of their day. For ease of photography, they were designed
simultaneously to be in focus for visual use and for imaging with early,
blue-sensitive plates. Photography is still a consideration. Fluorite
doublets have excellent color correction for visual work, but that
correction often fails rapidly beyond the blue end of the spectrum, at
wavelengths to which many photographic plates respond: If we could see
just a little farther into the blue than we actually do, fluorite
doublets would make lousy visual telescopes. But we don't, so they are
superb: I've got one - a Vixen 90 mm f/9 - and I love it.

In the visual wavelengths, the comparison is a little different.
Most modern triplet apochromats have less longitudinal color than modern
doublets that use conventional glasses, or early ED glasses, but good
fluorite doublets generally equal the best of triplets, at least, across
the visual. Triplets have other advantages, though, particularly for
getting excellent images across a wide field, as useful for photography.

SCALING LONGITUDINAL COLOR:

How about for other sizes of telescopes? Well, things scale as
follows: The linear diameter of the Airy disc depends only on the f
number of the telescope, and on the wavelength. The actual formula is:

Airy disc diameter = 2.44 * lambda * f,

where lambda is the wavelength and f is the f-number. If you are
puzzled because you thought bigger telescopes gave better resolution -
smaller diffraction patterns - you are right, but so am I. This
formula is for linear diameter, not angular diameter. An 8-inch f/10
telescope has twice the scale at the image plane, as a four-inch f/10,
so that same-linear-size Airy disc takes up only half as much angle on
the celestial sphere.

If you hold the focal length constant, and change the aperture of
the lens, the diameter of the purple blur circle changes in proportion
to aperture. But if you hold the aperture constant and change the focal
length, the diameter of the purple blur circle remains constant.

So if you go from a four-inch f/10 to an eight-inch f/10, by simply
scaling up the lens design by a factor of two, you get twice as big a
blur (twice as much aperture), but you still have the same size Airy
disc (still f/10), so the ratio of purple blur circle diameter to Airy
disc diameter is doubled. If you want it back the way it was, you have
to make your eight-inch telescope f/20 instead of f/10. That doesn't
change the blur circle size, but it makes the diffraction disc twice as
large. Now you see why large refractors often have long focal ratios.

Alternatively, if you speed up your four-inch f/10 to f/5, you
haven't changed the blur circle size, but you have cut the diameter of
the Airy disc in half, so all of a sudden that blur circle looks a lot
bigger in proportion. Now you understand about all those colored star
images in little rich-field refractors.

Unfortunately, there is more to color correction of refractors than
longitudinal color. There is a major aberration we haven't considered.

SPHEROCHROMATISM:

Spherochromatism, or change in spherical aberration with wavelength,
is a little confusing. To see what is going on, imagine we have set up
a telescope for testing its figure - by star-testing, by null-testing
with a knife-edge, by a Ronchi screen, or whatever. Suppose further,
that we have arranged to perform the test in various wavelengths of
light - perhaps by using a bunch of narrow-bandpass filters. The
question is, is the figure equally good (or equally bad) at all
wavelengths? The answer is, not necessarily, and a lens which has
different figures at different wavelengths of light is said to have
spherochromatism. Now clearly, correction for spherical aberration is a
big deal in telescope objectives - after all, that is the only thing
that people who make paraboloids worry about. So it follows, that
spherochromatism in a refractor matters a lot.

Our imaginary test setup provides a good way to understand the
difference between longitudinal color and spherochromatism. A lens with
no spherochromatism would give a perfect test result at every
wavelength, but if it had longitudinal color, we would have to refocus
the test apparatus, or change the knife-edge position, every time we
changed filters. A lens with no longitudinal color would not require
refocusing on wavelength change, but if it had spherochromatism, it
would give different test results at different wavelengths.

What the designer of a simple visual objective will probably do is
make the spherical aberration small at the wavelength to which the human
eye is most sensitive - green - and trade off spherical aberration at
other wavelengths till the correction is about the same in magnitude but
opposite in sign in blue and red. It is hard to separate the effects of
longitudinal color and spherochromatism under test, and indeed, what
counts is their combination - that's why designers publish spot
diagrams in many colors. But for understanding, it is useful to
distinguish them.

If a lens had no longitudinal color, then spherochromatism would be
visible in the star test, as color in the out-of-focus images of a star.
Perhaps the edge of the out of focus diffraction pattern would look
purplish, and the center greenish, or the other way around. I sometimes
think I see this effect in my 98 mm f/6.7 Brandon refractor, whose
objective is an one of Roland Christen's early triplet apochromats.

SCALING SPHEROCHROMATISM:

I don't have any generalizations about how spherochromatism varies
with type of lens design. But its significance scales with the design,
if you change both aperture and focal length in the same proportion.
That is, if a four-inch f/10 focuses red light from the 70 percent zone
half a wave longer than red rays from the center, then when you double
all lens dimensions (making an 8-inch f/10), that half wave will double,
too, and increase to a whole wave. Once again, large objectives are a
difficult proposition.

LATERAL COLOR:

One chromatic aberration of eyepieces is worth mentioning, simply
because it is common: In systems with decent objectives, it is often the
most obvious chromatic aberration of the whole telescope. That is
chromatic difference of magnification, or lateral color. It has nothing
to do with color correction of the objective - for the time being, we
can assume that the objective is textbook perfect. The problem occurs
when eyepiece focal length varies with wavelength. When that happens,
since magnification is inversely proportional to eyepiece focal length,
the magnification will be different at different wavelengths.

Suppose you are looking at the Moon. The image you see, perhaps,
will be a small red Moon, a medium-sized green Moon, and a large blue
Moon, all superimposed. (Red and blue might be reversed - it depends
on the eyepiece design.) The edge of the Moon will appear bluish -
that's the large blue image, sticking out from the superposition, and
the boundaries of shadows and of materials of different brightnesses
will have red and blue colored fringes.

Lots of binoculars have lateral color. You can see it in daylight
as colored fringes at boundaries between light and dark areas, that are
bigger at the edges of the field of view.

REFERENCES:

Most of the material I have described here is basic optics. It will
be covered in most books on optics, and will be touched upon lightly in
introductory college physics texts. A good source for more detail is